My favourite Mozilla bug, the cropping of “title” attribute tooltips, recently turned five. That is, it is now more than five years since the bug was originally reported. A flurry of new discussion has popped up around it, with some people strenuously arguing that tooltips should be cropped, as they were never intended to hold long strings of text, and people can’t read a lot of text in the six seconds displayed.
Pah, to hell with that. At least if all the text is displayed, the user has the choice of reading it or not. And it could be an option in about:config if it were that worrisome to the Inquisition. It’s not even as if the web standards spell out that the text should be cropped at a particular point.
Until bugs like this are fixed (without users having to install a separate fix such as PopupAlt), it’s hard to justify pushing Firefox onto everyday users.
As much as I agree with you on this bug, it’s bloody annoying, it wouldn’t stop me from pushing Firefox on to every day users.
I would think that every day users would probably care more about avoiding pop-ups, rogue Active X controls and spyware/malware than viewing all the info in an Alt pop up. I know that as soon as I update my mum’s computer Firefox will be the first thing I install, and she’s about as everyday user-ish as they come.
hmm good point. You’re probably right — security, popups etc are much more important than niggly little things like that. I suspect that in the right hands, IE6 can be made just as secure (and almost as usable — tabs would be the primary let-down), but again, this is not something a novice user can do, and installing FF and using that instead would be easier.
I don’t use Firefox but my flatmate does and she reports that it won’t work with WindowsUpdate which only seems to recognise IE. That’s a mongrel for her as the main reason she turned to FF in the first place was an inconsistent and seemingly unfixable problem with IE that made it impossible to read *any* web pages at all!
Is the WindowsUpdate-hates-Firefox *also* unfixable? Or is there a demon tweak involved? [You know … with the black rod in the left hand and wearing a pointy hat with stars and moons on it …]
WU requires ActiveX so it is IE only. Why not turn on Automatic Updates and then you don’t have to remember to visit the WU site?